Some of my favorite poets happen to be named William – William Shakespeare, William Blake, William Wordsworth, and William Carlos Williams.

When I meet most people, I often ask them what their names mean or the backstory of their names.

When I was a teen, I met two juvenile delinquents. They were destined to end up in group homes, reform schools, jails, reformatories, insane asylums, and prisons. When they first started getting arrested, they had to come up with aliases because the truant officers and police never believed their names, perhaps not as a pair. I wish I could do justice to how they tell the story, with affected accents and all. Every time I heard the story, and we had an enduring friendship, meaning I heard it many times, it would bring me to uncontrollable laughter. They could have been a comedy duo. They were George Washington and Thomas Jefferson!

From the very beginning, truant officers and police didn’t believe they were Washington and Jefferson, although those were their surnames.

“The first time I told a cop my real name,” George Washington said, “the cop slapped me upside the head. And, of course, I had to be with Thomas Jefferson! And the first time, the cop said, ‘And your friend is Ben Franklin?’ Then I didn’t know I had the right to remain silent, but I shut up. ‘And you, boy,’ the cop said to my ace boon coon, ‘what’s your name?’ My friend said, and I could see him bracing himself for the blow, ‘Thomas Jefferson, SIR!’ The cop hit him harder upside the head than he had hit me. After several encounters with cops, giving our real names and being punished for the truth, we became George Blackmon and Thomas More, our favorite aliases. In fact, every time we got picked up by cops, we gave them different names. We never asked our parents why they named us after two slavers and a rapist to boot! All we found in those ‘slave names’ was persecution!”

I didn’t ask my parents why they named me William, so I have no backstory, though I say they knew I would become a poet, because there’s a certain providence in naming your children.

Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:

To make a poet black, and bid him sing.

• Countee Cullen